1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to the computer field, and more particularly to a method and system for amending the display property of grid elements.
2. Description of the Related Art
A multi-dimensional grid and a spreadsheet are common data analysis tools, wherein the data are always associated with each other. For example, a member of a multi-dimensional grid, when expanded, can be displayed as many instances (columns/rows with the same name or meaning). The user can browse the data in a multi-dimensional grid or a spreadsheet to conduct data analysis.
When a multi-dimensional grid and a spreadsheet render data, the display form of elements thereof might not be able to meet requirements of a user. As a result, the user usually needs to customize the properties of respective grid according to his/her requirements. For example, when data to be displayed is too long, the size of a data cell might not be big enough to display it completely. As such, the size of the grid needs to amend to display the data completely.
A first known solution for resizing is using Microsoft Excel. Grid resizing in spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel is to resize columns or rows separately, not to resize by members. In addition, in most cases, current Microsoft Excel is not used as a web-based application or as an ActiveX component, nor distributed across the network and using client/server technology in a network environment.
A second known solution for resizing is by resizing a grid in a web-based multi-dimensional spreadsheet. In most web grid solutions (even using AJAX technology), resizing is based on setting sizes for columns or rows separately, and it is neither used for resizing members nor dealing with multi-dimensional hierarchy or parent members. The currently known solutions have some drawbacks. For solutions of resizing on columns or rows without using member, since the association between members is not utilized, it is inefficient and inconvenient due to repeated operations to adjust separately all the columns/rows with the same member name to the same size. Moreover, sizes of grid elements in different member hierarchies are not handled accordingly after data navigation like drill up, drill down or pivot. If sizes of grids at a parent hierarchy have been set, the sizes of grids at the sub-hierarchy will not be affected after drill up or drill down. However, the interaction may occur if resizing is based on separately setting sizes for columns or rows. Most grid resizing methods can not be applied to the multi-dimensional grid, for it can neither handle resizing in a multi-dimensional hierarchy, nor process the size of a parent member.
In a large analytical statement like a banking data analytical statement, it is required to display the loans of its outlets by year, the header column has two rows: one being the organization dimension and the other being time dimension (year). A combination of an outlet with a specific year corresponds to a column. Since the bank may have thousands of outlets, there must be thousands of members to spread in the organization dimension, and the grid must display thousands of columns. If it is required to resize the width of a column representing a year like 2002 uniformly but separately to a width like 200 pixels, it would be rather inefficient and inconvenient. Therefore, a solution, by which if only the display property of one column/row of a grid is adjusted, then the display property of all the associated columns/rows are automatically adjusted to the same parameter, is needed.